What BMW's autonomous drift car is really all about

The reality is less fun—and more important to the future of driving.

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If you like cars and have been on the internet within the past day, you've likely read a headline proclaiming that BMW has built a car that drifts itself.

To this, we say: Uh-huh, Sort of, and Not really.

The somewhat misleading headlines stem from the photography and video accompanying BMW's big announcement, a future technology suite called ActiveAssist, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. The clip below shows a guy in an M235i sitting back, hands on his thighs, while the car takes him for a spirited ride around the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Looks like fun—sort of. In the middle of the video, the car hits a wet patch, slews sideways, and catches itself. The photo is of the car mid-slide. It's this aspect that's generating headlines, but that last action, where it catches itself, is the new bit.

I hate to take some of the fun out of it, but here's the deal: This system does not initiate drifts. There's no drift button. It's not intended to put Formula D guys out of a job. In fact, BMW doesn't even use the word "drift" anywhere in the short unveiling of ActiveAssist to the world.

Good. So it's not another poseur's electro-nanny, like launch control or the burnout button on the BMW M3 and M4. But it will make you look like a better driver than you are, because when it has taken over the controls, it drives a perfect line, no matter the conditions. Or at least, that's its intention.

A few things make this system (or, really, collection of subsystems) different from the auto-steer setups in cars you can buy from Mercedes-Benz, Infiniti, and even Jeep today. First off, it uses steering input when it encounters traction problems instead of relying solely on brake-based stability control to keep the car on the intended line. Second, more sensors—ActiveAssist employs LIDAR and ultrasound in addition to the cameras and radar being used in current autonomous systems. And it carries all of these sensors pretty much out of sight, keeping it looking like a car and not a contraption like other autonomous research projects.

The result is what BMW calls "highly automated driving at the limit." In reality, this is the car that un-drifts itself. The system can catch such a slide, as it does in the video, countersteering for oversteer or opening up the wheel in case of understeer. It's the next logical step in the evolution of automated steering, going, and stopping.

As BMW rightly points out, people are only going to trust autonomous cars when the car can go into autonomous mode and stay there, in all situations and conditions, without driver input. In other words, they're no good unless they work every time, all the time, without fail, for any user. This is the level of functionality we've come to expect from things like electronic throttle and electric-assisted power steering, and we need that same amount of electro-mechanical trustworthiness—actually, more—if we're handing the controls of those systems over to another super system.